“Or did you have your fingernails honed on a whetsone, my darling?”

“Mistakes can be profited by Man, when i was young I showed my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”

“You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was young I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.”

“How like a mirror, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you? People were more often - he searched for a simile, found one in his work - torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?”

“He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often--he searched for a simile, found one in his work--torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people's faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?”

“What did the others give to each other?Nothingness.Granger stood looking back with Montag. “Everyone must leave something behindwhen he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or awall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your handtouched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and whenpeople look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. Thedifference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in thetouching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; thegardener will be there a lifetime.”

“How must it have felt, Pikes, the night they seized your films, like entrails yanked from the camera, out of your guts, clutching them in coils and wads to stuff them up a stove to burn away! Did it feel as bad as having some fifty thousand books annihilated with no recompense? Yes. Yes. Stendahl felt his hands grow cold with the senseless anger.”